I just spent the last 3 hrs in an open field and I cant seem to drive more than 300'. I consistenly throw the same with both feet planted, one-stepping, and even x-stepping... why is this? Momentum problems?

BeachBum wrote:I just spent the last 3 hrs in an open field and I cant seem to drive more than 300'. I consistenly throw the same with both feet planted, one-stepping, and even x-stepping... why is this? Momentum problems?

What discs are you throwing and how does the flight of that disc look when you throw it? Like is it stalling out? Doing a huge Anny? Etc.

My wraith, orc, roadrunner,polaris ls, and t-bird are all throwing the same pretty much. Semi straight with a little hyzer fade at the end. When I walk to pick them up they are within 20 ft of one another...

BeachBum wrote:My wraith, orc, roadrunner,polaris ls, and t-bird are all throwing the same pretty much. Semi straight with a little hyzer fade at the end. When I walk to pick them up they are within 20 ft of one another...

If the Wraith is going the same distance as a Roadrunner and has the same flight it smells likes nose up (and weight forward and yada yada we'll stick with nose up). How high off the ground are these shots? Do they gain a great deal of altitude as they travel?

It is my opinion that you should put that Wraith and maybe Orc away until you get your Teebird and/or Roadrunner out to 300. I feel they would hurt you more than help you when you're trying to throw past this plateau.

Fact 1: 300 ft is about as far as most men can throw using primarily the strength of their arm to propel the disc. For women it is closer to 230 ft.

Fact 2: The fact that you get the same distance no matter how you do your step implies that you aren't getting anything out of your legs, which drive your torso, which is the platform for your shoulders...

Your arm is of order 10X less powerful than your legs/torso. Stop throwing with your arm! Your arm is only useful for positioning and gripping, other than that, it is purely passive. Your arm needs to be turned into a whip that is driven by the powerful motion of your legs/hips/torso/shoulders.

Here's an exercise I might suggest:

Stand still with your arms at your side, completely relaxed. Turn your hips and torso back slowly and then rotate your hips quickly to the open position. Your arms should be whipped out and around in a windmill motion, without you using a single muscle in your arms. That's the feeling you should be aiming for.

Next do the same thing, except extend your throwing elbow out sideways from your body and hold it there (as if you put a vice around your shoulder). Allow your lower throwing arm and hand to hang limp from your elbow. Do it as if your arm were asleep and some mechanical device was locked onto your shoulder to keep the elbow pointed out side ways from your torso. Don't allow your elbow to move forward or backward, nor up nor down. It is completely locked in place, as if you no longer even had a shoulder joint and your upper arm were fused into your shoulder so that it would always point out sideways.

Now slowly turn your hips and torso back, and turn them abruptly open again. Don't use a single muscle in your arm! Now you should find that you've turned your arm into a whip. Your lower arm should be whipping forward super-fast. In fact, you can whip your lower arm forward way faster in this manner than your arm muscles could ever dream of doing. Your arm muscle strength decreases rapidly as speed increases, so they are useless anyways...trying to use them will only slow down this motion. You'll find that whipping your lower arm forward in this manner, with the elbow "stopped," will feel relatively effortless in comparison to trying to throw with your arm as you've probably been doing before.

Practice getting this feeling for a while. (Later you can work on the grip and positioning in finer detail, but for now focus on using your legs/hips/torso/shoulders as the powerful motor for whipping your arm forward.)

I will say from personal experience that strong-arming is a hard habit to break. I still find myself doing it when just doing indoor drills like the ones he talked about. When I get a disc in my hands its even harder, but I 'm not giving up!

Because of some of the stuff I and others have mentioned, you're not getting enough snap or speed on the discs. Thus, you're not getting the wraith up to it's required speed to behave like it should.

I'd bet that one thing you're doing is pulling from the reach back. You want to wait until you are almost facing the target and the disc is against your chest before you really pull hard. The rest of the motion is rotation and speed generated by your legs, hips, torso and shoulders. You get all that spinning around, pull the disc into your chest and then when you're almost facing front, you pull hard and fast and it's a lot of energy and momentum built up for you to take advantage of. The difficulty is when you put that much momentum and speed into a throw, it takes some good timing to get it to go where you want.

I would also continue to throw the Wraith in field practice. It's a disc that, when you do get your core muscles driving the throw, it won't turn and burn on you. It has enough high speed stability to avoid that. If you're only throwing understable discs, then when you do get power into the throw, it can turn and burn and you'll think it wasn't a good throw, when in fact it was probably a good tug. So you get negative reinforcement instead of positive reinforcement by throwing understable discs. The Teebird is also very good for avoiding turn and burn. The Roadrunner can be thrown far, but you have to know what's coming and adjust the hyzer angle to avoid turn and burn. You'll know when you've gotten the Wraith up to flying at its intended speed. It'll turn just a tad and glide out for a long ways. It'll feel good, and you'll want to do it again. And again. Also good to keep a Wraith in the bag even with 300' power, for head winds and such.

Thanks for the inside drills JHern...it does feel effortless when I do this. Obviously I am trying to strong-arm the disc, becuase without a disc in my hand, I get a lot more snap from my wrist using my lower body to bring me from my reachback. Cant wait to practice and incorporate this into my routine.

BeachBum wrote:Thanks for the inside drills JHern...it does feel effortless when I do this. Obviously I am trying to strong-arm the disc, becuase without a disc in my hand, I get a lot more snap from my wrist using my lower body to bring me from my reachback. Cant wait to practice and incorporate this into my routine.

Great! Glad it helped. The feeling of the throw is everything. You could technically get your body into all the correct positions and everything during a throw, but still be throwing with the arm muscles instead of using your core to whip your arm passively. Only your muscles will really know the difference (well, we'll be able to see that the arm doesn't whip forward as fast either). So getting the feeling of using the torso to whip your lower arm out from the elbow as a fulcrum is the most important thing, and to strive for the feeling more than any other aspect.

Give this a few weeks and focus on it, and you'll be up to 350' in no time.

Damn JHern. I've been working on the right-pec (well....left) drill and working on pulling late and accelerating at the hit. But it is now obvious that I still haven't been using my lower body properly to drive the whip. I'm all arm and not even that strong. I'm been stuck at a max of 275' for what feels like forever. I have been able to reduce my nose-upness quite a bit thought.

I'm having trouble picturing being able to use my lower body to drive the whip and still be able to have any sort of an elbow chop, but one step at a time.

josser wrote:I'm having trouble picturing being able to use my lower body to drive the whip and still be able to have any sort of an elbow chop, but one step at a time.

I've been trying to find an image or something that would illustrate this, but no luck. Here is a fictional story to illustrate what I had in mind: Imagine somebody badly broke their shoulder joint somehow, on their throwing arm. To heal it properly, the doctor decided to immobilize the shoulder by making a plaster cast which keeps the elbow held out to the side. The plaster cast covers the entire chest and shoulders front and back (kind of like the shoulder pad rig worn by football players, but plaster), and the cast also extends down the upper arm all the way to the elbow. The person is then forced to walk around with their elbow pointed out sideways. They can't move their elbow up, down, forward, backwards, or anywhere at all. It is held firm by the one-piece cast that is rigidly attached to their upper torso. Their lower arm and hand hangs down from the elbow, and is free to move about the elbow joint.

OK, got that picture? Now, here is my claim: this person could throw a disc farther than 300' fairly easily. And here's why: all they have to do is swivel their hips back, and with power starting from the ground up through firmly planted legs, they rotate their hips/torso/shoulders back open quickly, and their lower arm will whip around and zoom forward very fast. Put a disc in their hand and have them release it when the arm is near full extension, and that disc will be flying very quickly. It will be moving much more quickly than they could have achieved by keeping their body fixed and trying to whip their arm forward with their triceps strength alone. This is the whip.

BUT DON'T TRY THIS CAST AT HOME! Unfortunately, this person will only get to throw the disc like this once, because they'll break their elbow joint backwards since the cast is fixed in place and the arm can't follow through. The upper arm's momentum will carry through and the biceps will be unable to arrest the motion. This would be extremely painful.

What you want to do is pretend as if you had this cast on, but that the cast suddenly disappeared just after the disc leaves your hand, and then your arm can relax and follow through so that you don't, in fact, break your elbow backwards. But just a split second before the disc rips out, you should still try to stop your arm from swinging open with all your might as if it would break if you failed to stop it. Grip and clamp down as hard as you possibly can on the disc with all your might during this moment, and feel the disc fling off your fingers with a rapid spin.

To drive home the point that you shouldn't actually try to immobilize your shoulder this way, here is an illustration of what happens if you break your elbow backwards...caution, not for the weak of stomach...